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Applications

Overlay TV & Video display: We recommend XawTv.
There are a patch available for the latest version of XawTV that make it work better with the
Marvel driver; grab it here (3.95).
Older patches are available here.
Tip of the day: Put "xawtv.xv: false" into your .Xdefaults file.

MJPEG recording & playback: Please have a look at the ongoing development
at The MJPEG/Linux square. You can also find a driver for a number of other MJPEG cards there.
The Buz/Linux page can also offer valuable information (see the Buz/Linux FAQ, for example).

# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 3
or (tv only)
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 2
then
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -o 1 X (where X is 1 or 2 to get PAL or NTSC).
You should then get 50/60Hz picture on your monitor, plus picture on your
TV.
To get back to monitor-only output:
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 1
To get TV-only output (monitor will powerdown):
# matroxset -f /dev/fb0 -m 2
If you will see green artifacts on TV, make sure that your vertical
picture size is at least 525 for NTSC and 625 for PAL (i.e. for
PAL you cannot use 640x480, you must use at least 640x576).

Nice - but the G200's an SVGA chip - what about the VIDEO stuff?

The G200 has special registers and functions which enable us to communicate with the rest of the hardware, namely:

a thing called the codec transfer engine, short CTE, which sits on
the G200 (Gernot: ok, the name CTE is my own invention, but it's of
good use to keep the ZR36060 and the CTE on the G200 apart). The CTE
runs the communication between the Zoran JPEG codec (short: ZR36060, or
'060) and the G200 (which in its turn communicates with the driver,
which in its turn talks to the application, see the link ? ;) ).
Without a properly working CTE, Motion JPEG compression/decompression
is not possible, and that's why we are currently working on getting it
under our control.

an I2C-bus, which connects to

The KS0127 video decoder, which takes the composite, S-VHS, tuner
or decompressed Motion JPEG signal, and writes it onto the preview
window in the G200/G400 graphics memory. It is also responsible for
generating a digital YUV-stream for the ZR36060 JPEG codec in compress
(recording) mode.

The MSP-3400 sound processor. This sounds quite advanced,
but unfortunately it isn't - the MSP-3400 is not able to sample audio
input signals digitally, it just turns the audio on or off, and you can
digitally adjust the volume. But the output from the MSP-3400 is going
to the line out of the board, where you have to "cable" it to your
soundcard to be able to record it.

The Philips tuner - a simple thing, but very important: You
feed it with antenna input, it returns you a S-VHS video signal to feed
to the KS0127.

The Maven chip - it is responsible for generating TV output.

Directions already taken

Our options are: Video4Linux, Video4Linux II,
Most work already out there regarding video and the G200's is more or
less V4L related, and that's why the current development mainly focuses
on Video4Linux I(incl. the new MJPEG extensions introduced by the Buz
driver). But the driver is layered in its inside, too, which makes it a
lot easier to "make up" a new API on it (like V4L2, which is already
working for TV).

Xv, also called Xvideo, is a slightly confusing description
for the scaling facility inside XFree86 4.x.x - it can scale up a
window without any CPU consumtion (it is done by the graphics hardware)
- it also allows to feed the card with YUV-data, which is converted to
RGB on the fly. but it has nothing to do with MJPEG playback, and not
even with TV or video overlay (although it is used by xawtv to scale up
the picture).

So - lemme see what other's have done!

(not so much left here, I think we have beaten all other efforts by
now ;) - if you find something that we haven't mentioned here, please
tell us on the list !)

I can help! I've got some info! Who are you?

How can I contact Matrox to bug 'em some more?

By all means - BUG 'em! Visit Matrox's Techical Support Forums to see what they offer.
They have been quite sloppy in answering our questions - but still: be
nice, don't flame them !! We will be able to complete the driver even
without their help :-)

Marvel Team
(Tribute to Eddie Galvez who has established this webpage)